External Anything

Testing the External Blogs plugin, I come to think; why not external *anything*? RSS used to its fullest potential allows you to mirror complete websites; re-distributing their contents in one centralized place without worrying about malaligned updates or forcing yet-another-site-to-manage on group admins.

I think a group admin should be able to easily add new pages for any group of RSS feeds. Forum and article feeds is one thing, and these can already be added albeit forced under the “Blog” label. However, even albums can be pulled in with RSS these days. Check this one out for instance:

I tested it with the ‘External Blog’ plugin however, and it was insufficient (not surprisingly, since it clearly isn’t intended for this purpose). The pictures did not show up, as they do in some other RSS aggregators I tested:

This GPL-licensed Joomla! module did it just fine, as well as being really extensible, so might be worth looking into for ideas: http://bit.ly/9cZs07

Taking this functionality one step further would be the ability to view say an RSS based gallery as just an ordinary gallery.

Most importantly though, I just want the ability to add RSS feeds to custom made pages, or replace default pages (at least blog and forum, maybe also wiki and gallery) with an RSS feed in their place.